I’d like to share a story with you. It starts in 1997. At the time, I was working at Eonic Systems, a company that later got acquired by Wind River Systems, now part of Intel.

Eonic (in a large part thanks to the brilliant account manager, Ludo Van Uffelen) had just closed a deal with the European Space Agency to provide base software for several of its missions. In that context, the hardware developers from DaimlerChrysler Aerospace (now part of Airbus Defence & Space group) visited the Eonic headquarters in Aarschot on a regular base, delivering updates on rather bizarre kit of hardware. I was a young software developer back then, working in a team under Frederik Leemans. He and the development manager, Jan Rosseel, gave me the opportunity of porting our operating system to the DaimlerChrysler hardware. I also wrote the first version of the drivers for their communication ASIC.

With Eonic growing, I moved on after that project. Didier Mordiva-Landu took over my code, cleaned it up and kept it up-to-date. I became the responsible for all technical customer contacts, so I delivered documentation and visited ESA/ESTEC, the Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon and plenty of other space related agencies to train the programmers how to use our operating system.

One of the projects ESA and its subcontractors were working on, was the Rosetta spacecraft. The code that we wrote back then is used in the Osiris instrument, the storage system, the CCD camera and other subsystems. It makes me very proud, then, to see what ESA is achieving with this mission. I would like to thank everybody whom I knew at Eonic, at ESA and its subcontractors for the great times and the great work we did. The adventure is just starting!